


wyoming

by inkspl0tches



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, part of the great tumblr migration im doing rn for no reason, some old s11 spec fic for the now Iconic ghouli
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-02 21:45:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15805179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkspl0tches/pseuds/inkspl0tches
Summary: They know all the same people. For years, they’ve shared their haunted homes. All their ghosts are neighbors.





	wyoming

Mulder is swinging the plastic bag so that she can hear the sunflower seed packet dance off the bottle of Advil, coming out of the slanted gas station. She hears the rustle before she sees him. She used to think he would be a terrible ghost, always too sincerely obvious to make good at haunting.

The absurd gold car, the kind of thing Missy or Marcus would have liked, a whole lifetime ago, is thrumming out of the lot. It jerks and hums. The boy had told her he’d just gotten his license, even though he looked older. Sixteen, seventeen. He’d called her _ma’am_.

“I feel like we used to take less Advil on these trips. Did we used to take less Advil?” Mulder shakes the bag for her attention. She turns to his voice like coming up from underwater.

He squints at her.  Laugh lines and crow’s feet and the stupid scar hidden on his temple from cracking his head on their bathroom mirror six summers ago.

“Scully? You okay?”

She sees him twenty-five years deep. She does not, will not ever, wish to be younger with him. Their soreness, sanded-down edges, are well earned. The outside of the bag says Thank You, Thank You, Thank You and he twists it on his wrist.

“Yeah.” She rubs her upper arms. “Someone recommended we get our tire pressure checked while we’re here. It’s the only gas station for a good while.”

Mulder rubs at the back of his neck. Laughs. “Okay. Are you planning on running off with some Wyoming mechanic? I see the appeal, Scully. I do. You always were kind of into unsolicited useless information.”

She smiles absently at him, calibrates her angles in his direction. The bite has gone out of them with age, with quiet resolutions and watching the dog run around the backyard.  

“It wasn’t a mechanic. It was a child.” She feels herself settle back into whatever sense of…she doesn’t know what to call it. She can’t name it without Mulder’s predilection for the unexpected, the wondrous and unprecedented and profound. She doesn’t have any proof to lay on the table, but she thinks he’ll understand. “A boy.”

“A younger man? And the blows continue to fall.” Mulder is opening the car door, not looking at her.

The sigh settles heavy and then disperses in her chest. This has always, always been her white whale. Mulder’s capacity for relentless searching, the kind that gapes wide in chests, was filled or closed or locked or shoved away with Samantha. She did this thing. He trusts her. This will always be her face to see in strangers and sword to fall on.

His hand on her back surprises her, but she leans in rather than away. There is no varied horizon for the gold car to have disappeared behind, no mountains in this flat basin county. Still, it’s gone. Swallowed up by distance and a blank slate sky.

“Are you alright?” Mulder is saying, quiet. She shrugs under his hand.

“Yes,” she says. “I’m — “ If she said fine, she wouldn’t be lying. The horizon goes on and on and on.

She settles on something else. “He just looked like someone.” Leans further into his hands.

They know all the same people. For years, they’ve shared their haunted homes. All their ghosts are neighbors. Mulder brings his hand up to her shoulder, squeezes once, but leans closer. “Who?”

There were long years where all she wanted was for him to stop turning everyone into someone else. For his sister to just be what she was, a face on a bulletin board, in a picture frame, in an empty file. But lost things have a life, too. Have a tendency to breathe and move find themselves in the edges of things, before you can blink. She turns towards him and shrugs. Wyoming is a flat place. They are neither of them used to having nowhere to hide.

“You,” she says. “He looked like you.”


End file.
